AT&T Fail
This post is a rant, just to give you a heads up.
For about two months now our phones have been degrading in performance and usability. The issue is an intermittent inability to make and receive calls, establish a data connection, or send and receive text messages. Basically useless phones! If you've ever shown 4-5 bars on your AT&T phone, gone to make a call, had it say "Dialing..." for 30 seconds (no ringing) followed by "Call Ended" with a logged talk time of 0 seconds, you know my pain. Unfortunately, redialing and resetting the phone have no effect.
Before you think I'm ranting about how horrible AT&T's network is, I want to explain that before these issues started we had very little trouble with our phones, 8 months of good service. This post is rather about security policies in place at AT&T, in particular their differing policies between their phone service and their brick and mortar service.
You see, a week ago I finally got fed up with having to wardial every time I try to reach someone, so I called AT&T tech support. A few reboots of my phone showed no improvement, so the technician did a "SIM Update", citing that our SIM chips had not been updated since the account was opened. At first blush this seemed to help, but the next day everything was back to normal. After a couple more phone calls a ticket was set up and I got a voicemail telling me to get the SIM chips replaced.
This afternoon I went in to the storefront with both our phones in hand to get new SIM chips, and was told I couldn't because of a storefront policy of only allowing hardware changes if Alaina was present or called in from work to set me up. I explained that not only do I pay for the account, but that I've got a ticket number they can check on and I've been making changes to the account in the past. Not a budge, even after asking a manager for help. I wasn't very nice myself after that, and had to call back and apologize.
I would understand their position if they didn't allow you to make any and all changes over the phone with just the last four digits of a social security number for confirmation. So my AT&T service continues to be broken, their storefronts are full of bureaucrats, and they've wasted nearly a day worth of my time. I'm not sure whether to cancel or not. I expect that with enough griping I could get a refund for the two months of shoddy service, which should cover any cancellation fee they try to charge. What do you think I should do?
Stress-less
The last two weeks have been very pleasant and enjoyable, but I feel like I've been idling at 10% throttle, which is far short of normal for me. This site and blog are an effort to keep the world informed about my hobbies, research, and profession. I don't expect too many readers as I don't plan to promote or advertise in any way, but I will send prospective employers, contractors, friends, and family to this page rather than boring them (and myself) with repetitive updates.
Professionally, I am an entrepreneurial software and systems architect focused on distributed and peer to peer systems. I recently left my position as Vice President of Systems Operations at Brand Asset Digital, LLC in order to maintain creative freedom and to explore other paths in computer science. Brand Asset Digital is transitioning from development to sales and support, and I prefer to develop new technologies rather than maintain existing ones. My position was eating most of my time and preventing progress on my research, so I am looking for new employment in the 40-60 hours per week range rather than the 60-80 hours per week range.
Please check my resume and give me a call if you are interested in my skill set. Pensacola is not the best locale for a career based on technology, so I am prepared to interview and move out of state or work remotely.
At the moment, I am working on five projects. Two are iPhone Apps that I won't discuss on here due to a very competitive atmosphere. I'm also working on temporally aware video codecs, massively concurrent real time analytics, and distributed (as in peer to peer) computation. Setting aside the iPhone applications, which I consider possible money makers, my research and development is focused on hard problems. Making money off solutions to these problems is not my forte, so I work with others to do so.
I'll keep this post short so as to save some content for tomorrow. I'll try to maintain daily posts as long as possible.
